Tuesday, April 12, 2011

We discussed OOP concepts and started a project called ''Email Validation'' using the built-in-function IndexOf

In addition to the previous project, we will add New Form and we want now to repeat the previous SUB to Validate the Email on the new Form, to do so, we will need to copy the whole code and paste it to the new Form, now what if we wanted to add 20 New Form that require Email Validations for each Form of the 20 ... What would we do then ?! The answer is simple :
We shall use the OOP concepts to work this problem out ....

Creating SUB

We will create SUN [Validate_Email()] so we can validate Email in whole project without the need to copy and paste the same procedure 20 times for each Form.

Visual Basic Online Course - OOP

Visual Basic 2010 OOP

OOP Introduction

The original versions of Microsoft® Visual Basic® provided a mechanism for defining data structures in a user-defined type (UDT). A UDT encapsulates the data, but not the processing associated with that data. Processing was defined in global standard modules, often called BAS modules because of their .bas extension.

The release of Visual Basic 4 dawned a new age for Visual Basic developers. Visual Basic took its first steps toward becoming an object-oriented programming (OOP) language by providing object-oriented features such as class modules.

A class module defines data as properties and the processing associated with that data as methods. By defining a class for each business entity, encapsulating data in properties and processing in methods, Visual Basic developers had object-based development.

As Visual Basic evolved from version 4 to version 6, Visual Basic developers expanded their knowledge of OO 'Object-Oriented' to include component-based development (CBD) techniques. With CBD, Visual Basic developers could build complete three-tiered applications for Microsoft Windows® and the Web. This type of development was so common that Microsoft provided a design pattern known as the Microsoft DNA architecture.

Visual Basic .NET provides another leap in Visual Basic development capabilities and features and provides for true object-oriented programming, as detailed in this article.

OOP

For a programming language to be a true OOP language, the language must meet the following criteria:

Abstraction—Abstraction manages the complexities of a business problem by allowing you to identify a set of objects involved with that business problem.Encapsulation—Encapsulation hides the internal implementation of an abstraction within the particular object.Polymorphism—Polymorphism provides for multiple implementations of the same method. For example, different objects can have a Save method, each of which perform different processing.Inheritance—The excitement of Visual Basic .NET lies in inheritance. Visual Basic 5 introduced the concept of interface inheritance, which allows you to reuse the interface of a class, but not its implementation. Visual Basic .NET provides for true implementation inheritance whereby you can reuse the implementation of a class.

Now let's look at doing object-oriented programming in .NET.

OOP in Visual Basic .NET

Visual Basic .NET is not Visual Basic 6 with inheritance tacked onto it. Rather, Visual Basic .NET has been entirely rewritten to be fully object-oriented. In fact, everything in Visual Basic .NET can be treated as an object. Yes, even your strings and integers can be accessed as objects in Visual Basic .NET ............... Source WikiPedia

1) What's OOP ?

- Objects Oriented Programming

- It's the logic of programming

2) What does it do ?
- It helps the programmer to understand codes "where the code line came from - where is it going?" and enables him to be creative and able to create objects and controls .

Classes are sections of Code but superior to any other code in the Forms ... let's take an example.

- in our example we will try to make an application that makes sure that the TextBox writes only Email format (I.e. : UserName@EmailServerName.Extension), ain't that represents the most common Email format used? ... OK.

Let's start a new Windows Form Application Project from Visual Basic 2010. Our project will aim to notify the user whether an Email format was provided in the TextBox control placed on the form or not. We shall call this project Email-Format-Validation.

Project Design [GUI]

Visual Basic Online Course OOP - Classes

As you can see the Project design is so simple :Form1

Name : Form1

Label

Name : Label1
Text : Name

Label

Name : Label2
Text : E-mail

TextBox

Name : TxtName

TextBox

Name : TxtEmail

Button

Name : BtnValid
Text : Validate E-mail

Now, what does it mean (Make sure the user writes E-mail address format correctly or in Email format)??
- Means we want the application to Check the TextBox.Text contents and determines Weather the User wrote (@ and .) in it, because this is what the common Email Address format looks like ,right?!

OK, so we write this block of codes in the Click Event In the BtnValid Control

What did we write ?
We created two variables (X,Y) as Integers, because we shall refer to the place where the (@) is, by using X variable and the and the place where the (.) is, by using Y variable. OK?!

The line where X = TxtEmail.Text.IndexOf("@") means that X = the IndexOf of the text in TxtEmail where IndexOf is a function in VB 2010 comes with the Text Property Of the TextBox Control, and it locates a character's position (Zero based index) within the Text in a TextBox, and it's called a (Built-in Function), OK?

Again, the line of code means (Locate the position of the (@) Character within the property Text in the Control TxtEmail, Please) ...

The line where it says, If X >= 1 Then means, if our user typed (@), then X "The position" must be bigger than or equals to 1 , why not (0) ???

Because (Ahmed) = (0 1 2 3 4) [and that is called a Zero based index, Ahmed has 5 elements starting A=0 and ends with D=4] also Emails don't start with (@) so the position (X) must be in the second letter (1) or in later position, so (if the user wrote (@) then checked for the (.) symbol, Y also represents the position of the (.) symbol but (@) can not come after (.), so we must make sure of that, and this is why we repeated IndexOf function, we used another property of the IndexOf Function.

Y = TextBox2.Text.IndexOf(".", X)

Again ... the above line means : Locate the (.) symbol that comes after the (@) .

The line If Y < 1, Then means that if the user wrote the (.) at the first letter Zero position then the application will generate a message box, then End If to end the IF Statement that belongs to locating the @ symbol.

MsgBox ("Invalid E-mail Address")End If

Else the (@) at the (0) position

MsgBox ("Invalid E-mail Address") End If

End checking for (@) Locations it is after the (0) position already .

End Sub

Visual Basic OOP [Classes Intro] Homework :

(1) Please Design this Project On your own and notice how Email forms must be exactly typed as conditioned, and why (-1) shows sometimes !!??

(2) Where to write a message box that tells the user the the Email format is correct ?